Tag: public relations

Does PRSA Leadership Consider Gaslighting Ethical?

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For years, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has designated September as ethics month. The organization also has its annual convention and leadership assembly, with delegates from every regional chapter, in October. So the last day of September is a good time on the cusp of the two to consider ethics and leadership in PRSA.

The key question as noted in the headline is whether the leadership of PRSA who promote ethics in the profession consider gaslighting to be an ethical action. That question comes up because that has been strongly alleged by one member, Mary Beth West, APR, Fellow PRSA.

West, a veteran PR professional and long-time PRSA member, has been in a long-term battle with PRSA leadership after she asked leadership questions about financial discrepancies, even to the point of non-compliance with New York State Law. She also requested information about finances and other leadership issues, such as the insider approach of the current board appointing their friends as new board members. She has continued complaining about a lack of disclosure and transparency.

“Disclosure of Information” is a provision of the PRSA Code of Ethics. However, after asking the PRSA leadership to basically adhere to its own code of ethics, West was met at first with stonewalling, and then with gaslighting, and even punitive retribution. PRSA leaders responded tersely, then harshly, and then threatened to take away her APR (Accreditation in Public Relations) and membership in the College of Fellows.  All this for being persistent in asking honest questions.

(Self-disclosure: I am also APR and a member of the PRSA College of Fellows).

Apart from her displeasure in PRSA leadership failure to follow its own ethics code, West is most concerned that members of PRSA are not aware of how the organization is being led and what is happening with their dues. This includes those members who will represent their chapter in a few weeks at the National Assembly. She has worked to bring these issues to light with her Facebook page called A Better PRSA and a series of YouTube videos documenting her interactions with the PRSA board called #prsagaslighting .

It is not clear if this issue will be resolved or sputter. But, it is not just something between West and the PRSA board; it is really between the board and all members. I know of more than a few long-time PRSA members who have let their memberships lapse or are considering doing so because of their own disappointment with leadership. 

The question is if those members who remain will take the time to review West’s documented evidence of questionable board behavior and then ask leadership some questions of their own. If more people do so, there may be a more honest and civil response. Or to use terminology from crisis theory, perhaps the board will be moved to more ethical response that eschews denial and attack the accuser strategies and moves to apology and corrective action. 

The need to balance corporate and personal values

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Last semester in a  discussion about employee relations a student asked me about the situation in which an employee’s values don’t match the company values.

It’s a good question. I think about it personally. I myself have had to say publicly that I get my values from God and not my employer. 

Nevertheless companies talk a lot about their “values.”

The Institute for Public Relations Study recently addressed this question and shared a study on the subject. Of interest is that a third to almost a half of employees, by different age groups, said their company’s values aligned with their own “somewhat” or “not at all.”

My question is “should they?” And if so, what specific types of values?

I would say values should be categorized as collective vs. individual, or organizational vs personal.

Collective or corporate (i.e. any organization, not just a corporation) are universal, related to an organizations mission, and not likely to violate a personal value. Examples of these would be that the customer comes first, quality is job one, we try harder. Values related to how a job is done, operational goals, and organizational culture. 

Personal or individual values are based on more deeply held beliefs associated with an individual’s own identity. These are associated with an individual’s family, ethnic or national culture, faith, and other things that precede and supersede the workplace. Often these values are related to the hot topics debated in society that are not directly related to one’s job. 

So when a company “takes a stand on social issues,” which stand do they take? Are they conscious of the unintended consequence that stand serving as a proclamation to some employees—and other stakeholders—that their personal values-based position on said issue is not valued, welcomed, accepted? Such employees will go from ambassador to stranger, they will go from being proud of their job to seeing it as just a paycheck, and maybe a temporary relationship on the path to something where they don’t feel insulted.

Getting employees to identify with employer is great to some extent. We spend significant amount of time at work, one of the first things people ask you is what do you do or where do you work? I have read academic research about going beyond employee engagement to employee-organization identity fusion. That sounds a little extreme to me, as if a person gives up their individual identity in order to blend into a workplace. That is more akin to an authoritarian regime than the “value” of individual autonomy and diversity. 

Indeed, it is useful to foster a positive culture, one in which employees are engaged, productive, happy and serve as brand ambassadors even beyond the work setting. They can be proud of where they work, and even should be. But a profession and particular job is but one aspect of identity. I would even say it is secondary, marginal, and circumstantial.

Personal identity is deeper, more permanent. You can change jobs, it is harder to change your ethnicity, faith, and other aspects of personal identity. If implied one must do the latter they are increasingly likely to do the former.

The noble thing for companies to do, therefore, is work toward values that are appropriate for the mission of the organization as an aspect of organizational culture. But they should maintain and even be upfront about having institutional neutrality on the topics of our day that reflect a personal value. They should seek with intention a balance of being both non-discriminatory AND non-celebratory of any personal values.

This may be different in the case of small or privately owned enterprises, in which an owner will publicly proclaim their personal values or even make them part of the organizational values. This could be a follower of Jesus Christ or an avowed secular humanist. I’ve seen both. That is up to them. But in either case they will both attract and repel employees on the bases of personal value, as opposed to business metrics such as product or service quality, customer service and others. 

Of course, many non-profits were founded and exist  entirely around a cause that is intimately related to a value that is deeply personal. These could be as disparate as advancing the Christian Gospel or advocating for abortion. Here it would be ethical to be clear about a non-profit organization’s purpose, and it will affect who applies for jobs, volunteers and donates to the organization.

But behind alignment with core mission, neutrality on unrelated personal matters should be an organizational value with which most individuals can agree. I have written about the virtue of neutrality before.  

A term related to values that is expressed often in recent years by corporations and CCOs is “purpose.” Purpose generally defined is beyond mission and considers the positive role an organization plays in society. In discussing this concept at length, Ranjay Gulati in his book “Deep Purpose”  offers a cautionary note that echoes what I have been saying: “Culture should not coerce conformity. It should seek to find an overlap between personal passion and company goals. The best cultures facilitate individuality.”

Gulati also offers prudent advice about articulating values generally and enabling individuals to enact them. This is more like guidelines than rules and can help avoid a corporate value trampling on individual values. Among the many examples in the book he mentions Apple under Steve Jobs: “As we’ve seen, Steve Jobs helped create Apple University with the goal of training people not to think exactly as he did, but rather to understand his guiding principles and mindset and apply them using their own judgment in the leader’s absence.”

My answer to the student in class was brief and basically asked students to consider that there are differences between corporate and personal values. I did acknowledge that it was a good question and I have more to say on the subject. I’ve done that here, and I hope PR and other management professionals will give consideration to the difference.

PR at the intersection of corporate and environmental communications

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Consumers Energy is the public utility that provides electricity to my home. But rather than merely monitor my kilowatt hours and send me a bill, Consumers goes above and beyond in its communication.

They have shown this in two power outages in as many months in my small neighborhood in west Michigan. They have prompt text alerts and an up-to-date app confirming they know about the outage, showing the extent of the outage with numbers and maps, updating when crews are on site and have determined the cause, and giving an estimate of time for power restoration, and confirming when power is restored. It gives new meaning to consumer “empowerment.”

Consumers is also a unique organization. It is in a sense a corporation, but it is one that is regulated, in the case of Michigan by the Public Service Commission. So Consumers does what could be seen as typical corporate communication, another name for public relations, to maintain communications with all of its stakeholders. This can often seem weighted toward customer relations and sales.

But a recent communication I received from them included an example of the intersection between traditional communication and environmental communication. Environmental communication is broadly defined as formal communication that has the environment as a primary subject. There is even an academic journal named Environmental Communication. 

What Consumers sent me was a link to an entire section on their website about electronic vehicles (EVs). This makes intuitive sense, since anyone like myself who buys an EV is going to be wondering about how to charge the vehicle, whether at home or out on the road. Installing EV chargesr at homes is one of the products and services Consumers offers. The Consumers web page explains this at length. 

It would make sense they do this in business terms. It is a new market opportunity, a product extension, a B-B integration and more. But that is all corporate communication. Consumers gets into environmental communication as well with a tab called “myths and FAQs” that addresses the hesitance a typical consumer may have about buying and charging an EV. They first have to answer questions about the environmental need for EVs, the environmental benefit of EVs, and address concerns about negative environmental impact of EVs, before they can start serving consumers individually and society at large—via power grid supply—when the purchase of EVs hits critical mass.

As an academic, this brings to mind a bunch of theories that are so practical here. Consumers is applying concepts from these theories, whether they do so consciously or not:

  • Diffusion of Innovation—which means communication needs to address a series of cognitive and experiential stages the public goes through collectively and individually before adopting new ideas. Consumers is addressing the “relative advantage” and “compatibility” stages of this theory directly;
  • Attribution Theory—in which people consider not just what a company says but why they think they are saying it when deciding whether to attend to or believe a message. Consumers goes beyond simply offering product or service information to sell something to show they are considering the total social benefit to the environment;
  • Cognitive Dissonance—in which people avoid ‘cognitive pain’ by simply discounting information or claims that contradict their predisposition or current beliefs; Consumers is clearly addressing current beliefs and concerns of people and trying to move them to a new mindset without discounting their current onel.

I think Consumers did a good job overall. But there are still realities that people experience that negate the arguments Consumers makes. This is especially true in Michigan. 

For example, one argument could be that an EV may not be a household’s only vehicle. If I want to go from where I live in western Michigan up to Mackinac City, I would not be confident I have the range and can find a charging station in northern Michigan. Encouraging one EV on a household of more than one car would be a transition and easier to persuade than a complete change to all EV vehicles. 

I also have read legitimate reports about power reduction in colder climates, as well as batteries exploding. There are concerns about raw materials coming from third-world countries where workers are exploited, and that these raw materials can not be safely disposed of. Here is where the Elaboration Likelihood Model applies—Consumers can’t just make claims to the contrary, it needs to offer some detailed, factual, respectable studies to back up the claims. When people are “highly involved” according to ELM, they are paying significant attention and need more than a reliable source, they need the facts. This is especially true because EVs are really a subset of the much larger climate change social issue.

Most importantly, if we are charged more in the summer for air conditioning in peak hours, what will our rates and even capacity be when everyone is in an EV and charging at night? Consumers makes assurances, but people have heard and experienced differently about the electric grid capacity. 

Maybe some of these additional arguments and facts will come. But for now overall Consumers Energy offers a good example of how corporate and environmental communication co-exist.

Public relations must take an ethical stand against a ‘culture of assertion’

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An online seminar a few months ago gathered CCOs together to talk about advising corporate boards on issues of ESG (environment, social, governance) messaging, corporate purpose and related topics. I was interested because I am doing research on the PR capacity on corporate boards, because so many of the issues in PR—CSR, ESG, DEI etc—are being discussed by PR academics and professionals.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-stop-word-coming-out-of-a-typewriter-5993648/

The outtake from this meeting was that ESG may need a new name because of the pushback being felt from consumers, investors and others in corporate America. An interesting concept was that any time something has three letters and becomes an acronym it is ripe for pejorative connotations. Using two words such as ‘corporate purpose’ is harder to misunderstand or misrepresent, and that is what one participant advocated. In other words, change the nomenclature but consider the practice.

The bottom line for these CCOs advising large corporate boards, beyond ensuring they had and could articulate a corporate purpose, was to consider two things. 

  1. Employee Expectations: How does the board address any disconnects between corporate priorities, or values, and the employee experience? 
  2. CEO Voice: Are protocols in place to ensure that the CEO can speak with authenticity, credibility, and conviction, in real-time, on topics that are germane to the interests of the business and its employees?

I agree with that. Proclaiming a purpose and expecting compliance from all employees is authoritarian, not genuine. CEOs speaking out can backfire or offend or be seen as shameless piggybacking on what is perceived to be the popular sentiment on cultural issues.

I’ve written about this before in a post advocating for neutrality in most cases, and also noting that the emphasis on social branding has led to an anti-woke corporate response to woke corporate messaging. 

 So I was intrigued recently to see an academic journal article addressing the unethical practice of asserting vs dialogue by organizations on social issues. The article was a case study on Larry Fink of Blackrock, an investment services and financial management firm, and his annual letter to CEOs, which leaves everyone trembling to obey because Blackrock owns ⅓ of all outstanding shares of major companies.

I had thought about the appropriateness of the annual Fink letter when I first heard about it at a different conference of CCOs a few years ago. Should so many organizations respond in sync to the opinions asserted by one powerful man or company?

The journal article addressed this directly. “Public relations, activism, and the culture of assertion: The case study of Blackrock’s Larry Fink and the Letter to the CEOs”, written by Joshua Foust and Burton St. John III of the University of Colorado-Boulder, was published in late December in theJournal of Public Relations Inquiry. 

Fundamental PR is about two-way symmetrical relationships, mutual benefit for all publics or stakeholders, dialogue and listening. But in this article the authors note an increase in raw assertion and a disdain for dialogic speech. They conclude that “Fink uses his letter to shape shareholder views and actions, using the power of his position rather than facts either as a result of dialogue or to spark dialogue.”

So an academic article comes to the same conclusion I did when I first heard about the annual letter from Blackrock. 

I then got to thinking that this “culture of assertion” is at the root of a problem I have both as a citizen and a public relations academic. We see an increase in assertive statements in our culture recently. Consider several assertions:

  • “The vaccine is safe and effective.”
  • “Whites need to acknowledge their privilege.”
  • “It was the most fair election in history.”

The above statements, relative to the Covid pandemic, the spread of a specific DEI ideology, and questions about irregularities in the 2020 election are ubiquitous and assertive. But what’s worse is that responses to the contrary have been de-platformed or labeled as “disinformation.” 

But in recent months the problem of assertion has been exposed. Now data is coming out and even Anthony Fauci, who once proclaimed “I am science,” has acknowledged they got things wrong about the origin of covid, the nature of its spread, and the efficacy of the vaccine. A growing chorus of Black intellectuals are opposing the “oppressor-victim” binary in explaining the scope, causes and solutions to racism and equality. Independent journalism and court cases have been showing that there were numerous incidents of fraud and suspicious activity in the last presidential election.

Journalists like Michael Shellenbarger, Matt Taibi, Bari Weiss and others through their work with the Twitter files, FOIA requests and other investigative journalism have been exposing the deception behind this culture of assertion. They have another name for it in their writing and in Congressional testimony: “the censorship industrial complex.”

Being assertive can be seen as laudatory, associated with positive adjectives like strong, confident, certain, competent. But assertion can also violate fundamental ethics of public relations practice and principles of democracy.

Ethicists talk about what makes an occupation a “profession.” The answer is that it has a valuable service to society at large. What is the “role morality” of publics relations? It is simply enabling informed decision-making in a democratic society. And people can not make informed decisions without all the information. 

Asserting one’s own perspective and silencing opposing views is clearly toxic and should be confronted. 

I’ll confront the culture of assertion by re-asserting some long-standing and valuable principles vital to democracy and consonant with ethical public relations practice: pluralism, marketplace of ideas, mutual understanding, discourse ethics, dialogic communications, engagement, empowerment, and listening. 

There is a lot of talk in this election year about “threats to democracy.” Let us not let the public relations profession be one of them. 

A #GivingTuesday PR gift–The three Ls of non-profit fundraising

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I know Giving Tuesday campaigns are already underway. But being on the receiving end of so many before noon today, I want to respond by giving some public relations advice. 

My thoughts are also influenced both by having worked for a good length of time in nonprofit public relations and as a professor doing research on public relations and nonprofit management and fundraising. 

My first thought is that there is a pro and con to even having a day called Giving Tuesday. The pro is isolating the nonprofit sector and providing a high visibility day to encourage charitable giving. The con is that any single nonprofit’s Giving Tuesday push is lost among all the others. 

So here are some thoughts about how to manage the public relations behind Giving Tuesday (maybe next year at this point) as well as all other fundraising efforts throughout the year. I used a simple alliterative 3-part list you can call the three Ls of giving appeals.

List. Before even sending and posting Giving Tuesday message appeals, it is vital to think about the recipient. General messages may work to a point, but segmenting the list is better. Manage your database of donors and use it strategically. 

Consider that some have given already this year, maybe more than once. What compels them to give again on Giving Tuesday, especially if their last gift was very recent? Consider that maybe donors gave for a variety of specific aspect of your mission. You could offer the option to designate a gift for something specific, or promote not just a gift to the organization but a specific effort that may be new or underfunded. 

Also think about the varied capacities to give, in varied amounts. You would not ask a college student to give $1,000 or more, and you wouldn’t want to ask a millionaire to give $10. Make a specific ask in an appropriate amount. 

Factoring in the above could lead to a strategy of multiple Giving Tuesday messages and hashtags. Ask for gifts to fund specific capital campaigns or program efforts. Ask specifically in terms of challenging a specific dollar amount.

Leverage.  Don’t enter the Giving Tuesday fray all alone. Leverage testimonials from regular donors or partners. A nonprofit partnering with a corporation and leveraging that company’s network can be powerful. It can even be a causer-related marketing campaign that benefits the company with a demonstrated Corporate Social Responsibility or community relations effort. 

A challenge—for ever dollar given a company or individual will match—is another way to leverage support in a way that makes Giving Tuesday a unique opportunity for donors and not just a hype day.  

Lore. Don’t just ask, tell stories. Demonstrate the impact of past funding, even how last year’s total specific amount from Giving Tuesday had an impact in accomplishing whatever is the mission of the nonprofit—provided a certain number of meals, gave a specific number of scholarships, build a specified number of homes. 

Tell these stories in the voices of those affected, let the message be from them and not just about them. Don’t just communicate need for money but show accountability in how it has been used in the past. Donors are no longer motivated by guilt but by opportunity for impact. Make accountability and mission paramount, not a fundraising goal. Let it be about those who benefit directly from the organization’s mission, not the organization’s need for funding. 

I love to see nonprofits succeed. I believe that being more strategic and specific in Giving Tuesday appeals will lead to more persuasive messaging and positive result. If that’s the case for your nonprofit, be sure to report those results with a thank you to all who gave. 

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